Gender Questions

JACK HALBERSTAM is Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University in New York City. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995); Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998); In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005); The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011); and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). They have written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam is currently working on several projects, including a book titled Wild Things: Queerness After Nature. Here they are interviewed by Chantelle Gray van Heerden for Gender Questions on transgenderism, anarchism and other aspects of identity and queerness.

CHANTELLE GRAY VAN HEERDEN: Over the past few years there has been a noticeable increase of transgender people in movies and television series. We may think here, for example, of the movie The Danish Girl, the Amazon series Transparent, Jamie Clayton in the Sense8 and Laverne Cox from Orange is the New Black. One of the most pertinent issues here is the representation of transgender people who are often, though not exclusively (as the list above suggests), played—and therefore portrayed— by cisgender people. Do you think this kind of representation is problematic? I am also wondering if you think that this kind of transgender mainstreaming glosses over the very personal and deeply affecting emotions experienced by transgender people before, during and after coming out and/or transitioning.

This paper reads Deleuze-Guattarian and new materialist theories alongside two landmark works of speculative science fiction by Angela Carter and Octavia Butler that queer normative conceptualisations of gender and sexuality. These theoretical and fictional explorations argue that subjectivity should be reconceptualised as immanent rather than fixed. Utilising uncanny affective registers, they attempt to push rigid ideas about gender/sex toward more fluid configurations that affirm a heterogeneity of lived experiences, situating subjectivity along lines of becoming. To execute such moves, Deleuze and Guattari propose a kind of experimental and experiential rupturing process; a mechanism for accessing what is immanent to everyday experience, rather than governmental. This is particularly useful for exploring transgender and other minoritarian subjectivities. By invoking breaks or ruptures from habituated ways of thinking and feeling, as these philosophers suggest, writers, artists and theorists might succeed in creating points of emergence around which new configurations and relations of gender-fluid identities might coalesce. I will investigate how Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Carter and Butler, who wrote before the emergence of transgender studies during the 1990s, paved the way for nomadic conceptions of sexuality, gender and lived contradiction.

Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality, published nearly seven years ago, continues to be a challenging and engaging, though at times tricky philosophical thesis. Salamon sets out to challenge the assumed unmediated access and epistemological certainty of the material body, contending that “current ideas of what a body is will be irremediably diminished until trans bodies and subjectivities are considered in a more thorough way” (1). In part, the text is a defence of queer theory taking the somewhat circuitous route of addressing how trans critics perceive and understand queers’ reliance on social construction. It is this defence that is one of the most distinctive elements of the book, which is in turn—perhaps unsurprisingly so, given that she is also thanked in the opening to the text—also a defence of Judith Butler. The book also tackles some of the thornier issues that have, since its publication, come to dominate debates within transgender studies, including: the role, place and trajectory of trans autobiographies; visual representation and meaning making; and the on-going tense relationship between women’s studies and trans studies.